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  "Nothing like curbside service," Maeve said, feeling as if she had been reborn. "May I go with you?"

  "Feel up to it?"

  She nodded. "I think everyone will be glad to not have me ordering them about for a little while."

  Al Giordino sat in the pilot's seat of the turquoise NUMA helicopter and worked a crossword puzzle.

  No taller than a floor lamp, he had a body as solid as a bee keg poised on two legs, with a pair of construction derricks for arms. His ebony eyes occasionally glanced into the snow glare through the cockpit windshield, then seeing nothing of Pitt, they refocused on the puzzle, Curly black hair framed the top of a round face, which was fixed with a perpetual sarcastic expression about the lips that suggested he was skeptical of the world and everyone in it, while the nose hinted strongly at his Roman ancestry.

  A close friend of Pitt's since childhood, they had been inseparable during their years together in the Air Force before volunteering for an assignment to help launch the National Underwater & Marine Agency, a temporary assignment that had lasted the better part of fourteen years.

  "What's a six-letter word for fuzzballed goondorpher that eats stinkweed?" he asked the man sitting behind him in the cargo bay of the aircraft, which was packed with laboratory testing equipment. The marine biologic from NUMA looked up from a specimen he'd collected earlier and raised his brows quizzically.

  "There is no such beast as a fuzzballed goondorpher."

  "You sure? It says so right here."

  Roy Van Fleet knew when Giordino was sowing a cornfield with turnips. After three months at sea together Van Fleet had become too savvy to fall for the stubborn Italian's con jobs. "On second thought, it's a flying sloth from Mongolia. See if `slobbo' fits."

  Realizing he had lost his easy mark, Giordino looks up from the puzzle again and stared into the falling snow "Dirk should have been back by now."

  "How long has he been gone?" asked Van Fleet.

  "About forty-five minutes."

  Giordino screwed up his eyes as a pair of vague shapes took form in the distance. "I think he's coming in now,' Then he added, "There must have been funny dust in that cheese sandwich I just ate. I'd swear he's got soma one with him."

  "Not a chance. There isn't another soul within thirty kilometers."

  "Come see for yourself."

  By the time Van Fleet had capped his specimen jar and placed it in a wooden crate, Pitt had thrown open the entry hatch and helped Maeve Fletcher climb inside.

  She pushed back the hood on her orange jacket, fluffed out her long golden hair and smiled brightly.

  "Greetings, gentlemen. You don't know how happy I am to see you."

  Van Fleet looked as if he had seen the Resurrection. His face registered total incomprehension.

  Giordino, on the other hand, simply sighed in resignation. "Who else." he asked no one in particular,

  "but Dirk Pitt could tramp off into a blizzard on an uninhabited backwater island in the Antarctic and discover a beautiful girl?"

  Less than an hour after Pitt alerted the NUMA research vessel Ice Hunter, Captain Paul Dempsey braved an icy breeze and watched as Giordino hovered the helicopter above the ship's landing pad.

  Except for the ship's cook busily preparing hot meals in the galley, and the chief engineer, who remained below, the entire crew, including lab technicians and scientists, had turned out to greet the first group of cold and hungry tourists to be airlifted from Seymour Island.

  Captain Dempsey had grown up on a ranch in the Beartooth Mountains astride the Wyoming-Montana border. He ran away to sea after graduating from high school and worked the fishing boats out of Kodiak, Alaska. He fell in love with the icy seas above the Arctic Circle and eventually passed the examination to become captain of an icebreaking salvage tug. No matter how high the seas or how strong the wind, Dempsey never hesitated to take on the worst storms the Gulf of Alaska could throw al him after he'd received a call from a ship in distress, During the next fifteen years, his daring rescues of innumerable fishing boats, six coastal freighters, two oil tankers and a Navy destroyer created a legend that resulted in a bronze statue beside the dock at Seward, a source of great embarrassment to him. Forced into retirement when the oceangoing salvage company became debt ridden, he accepted an offer from the chief director of NUMA, Admiral James Sandecker, to captain the agency's polar research ship, Ice Hunger.

  Dempsey's trademark, a chipped briar pipe, jutted from one corner of his tight but good-humored mouth. He was a typical tugman, broad shouldered and thick waisted, habitually standing with legs wide set, yet he presented a distinguished appearance. Gray haired, clean shaven, a man given to telling good sea stories, Dempsey might have been taken for a jovial captain of a cruise ship.

  He stepped forward as the wheels of the chopper settled onto the deck. Beside him stood the ship's physician, Dr. Mose Greenberg. Tall and slender, he wore his dark brown hair in a ponytail. His blue-green eyes twinkled, and he had about him that certain indefinable air of trustworthiness common to all conscientious, dedicated doctors around the world.

  Dr. Greenberg, along with four crewmen bearing stretchers for any of the elderly passengers who found it difficult to walk on their own, ducked under the revolving rotor blades and opened the rear cargo door. Dempsey moved toward the cockpit and motioned to Giordino to open the side window. The stocky Italian obliged and leaned out.

  "Is Pitt with you?" asked Dempsey loudly above the swoosh of the blades.

  Giordino shook his head. "He and Van Fleet stayed behind to examine a pack of dead penguins."

  "How many of the cruise ship's passengers were you able to carry?"

  "We squeezed in six of the oldest ladies who had suffered the most. Four more trips ought to do it.

  Three to transport the remaining tourists and one to bring out Pitt, Van Fleet, the guide and the three dead bodies they stashed in an old whalers' rendering shed."

  Dempsey motioned into the miserable mixture of snow and sleet. "Can you find your way back in this soup?"

  "I plan to beam in on Pitt's portable communicator."

  "How bad off are these people?"

  "Better than you might expect for senior citizens who've suffered three days and nights in a frigid cave, Pitt said to tell Dr. Greenberg that pneumonia will be his main worry. The bitter cold has sapped the older folk's energy, and in their weakened condition, their resistance is real low."

  "Do they have any idea what happened to their cruise ship?" asked Dempsey.

  Before they went ashore, their excursion guide was told by the first officer that the ship was heading twenty kilometers up the coast to put off another group of excursionists. That's all she knows. The ship never contacted her again after it sailed off."

  Dempsey reached up and lightly slapped Giordino on the arm. "Hurry back and mind you don't get your feet wet." Then he moved around to the cargo door and introduced himself to the tired and cold passengers from the Polar Queen as they exited the aircraft.

  He tucked a blanket around the eighty-three-year-old woman, who was being lifted to the deck on a stretcher, "Welcome aboard," he said with a warm smile. "We have hot soup and coffee and a soft bed waiting for you in our officers' quarters."

  "If it's all the same to you," she said sweetly, "I'd prefer tea."

  "Your wish is my command, dear lady," Dempsey said gallantly. "Tea it is."

  "Bless you, Captain," she replied, squeezing his hand, As soon as the last passenger had been helped across the helicopter pad, Dempsey waved off Giordino, who immediately lifted the craft into the air. Dempsey watched until the turquoise craft dissolved and vanished into the white blanket of sleet.

  He relit the ever-present pipe and tarried alone on the helicopter pad after the others had hurried back into the comfort of the ship's superstructure to get out of the cold. He had not counted on a mission of mercy, certainly not one of this kind. Ships in distress on ferocious seas he could understand. But ship's captains who abandoned their p
assengers on a deserted island under incredibly harsh conditions he could not fathom.

  The Polar Queen had sailed far more than 25 kilometers from the site of the old whaling station. He knew that for certain. The radar on Ice Hunter's bridge could see beyond 120 kilometers, and there was no contact that remotely resembled a cruise ship.

  The gale had slackened considerably by the time Pitt, along with Maeve Fletcher and Van Fleet, reached the penguin rookery. The Australian zoologist and the American biologist had become friendly almost immediately. Pitt walked behind them in silence as they compared universities and colleagues in the field. Maeve plagued Van Fleet with questions pertaining to her dissertation, while he queried her for details concerning her brief observation of the mass decimation of the world's most beloved bird.

  The storm had carried the carcasses of those nearest the shoreline out to sea. But by Pitt's best calculation a good forty thousand of the dead birds still lay scattered amid the small stones and rocks, like black-and-white gunnysacks filled with wet grain. With the easing of the wind and sleet, visibility increased to nearly a kilometer.

  Giant petrels, the vultures of the sea, began arriving to feast upon the dead penguins. Majestic as they soared' gracefully through the air, they were merciless scavengers of meat from any source. As Pitt and the others watched in disgust, the huge birds quickly disemboweled their lifeless prey, forcing their beaks inside the penguin carcasses until their necks and heads were red with viscera and gore.

  "Not exactly a sight I care to remember," said Pitt.

  Van Fleet was stunned. He turned to Maeve, his eyes unbelieving. "Now that I see the tragedy with my own eyes I find it hard to accept so many of the poor creatures dying within such a concentrated space in the same time period."

  "Whatever the phenomenon," said Maeve, "I'm certain it also caused the death of my two passengers and the ship's crewman who brought us ashore."

  Van Fleet knelt and studied one of the penguins. "No indication of injury, no obvious signs of disease or poison. The body appears fat and healthy."

  Maeve leaned over his shoulder. "The only nonconformity that I found was the slight protrusion of the eyes."

  "Yes, I see what you mean. The eyeballs seem half again as large."

  Pitt looked at Maeve thoughtfully. "When I was carrying you to the cave, you said the three who died did so under mysterious circumstances."

  She nodded. "Some strange force assaulted our senses, unseen and nonphysical. I have no idea what it was. But I can tell you that for at least a full five minutes it felt like our brains were going to explode. The pain was excruciating."

  "From the blue coloring on the bodies you showed me in the rendering shed." said Van Fleet, "the cause of death appears to be cardiac arrest."

  Pitt stared over the scene of so much annihilation. "Not possible that three humans, countless thousands of penguins and fifty or more leopard seals all expired together from a heart condition."

  "There must be an interrelating cause," said Maeve.

  "Any connection with the huge school of dolphins we found out in the Weddell Sea or the pod of seals washed up just across the channel on Vega Island, all deader than petrified wood?" Pitt asked Van Fleet.

  The marine biologist shrugged. "Too early to tell without further study. There does, however, appear to be a definite link."

  "Have you examined them in your ship's laboratory?" asked Maeve.

  "I've dissected two seals and three dolphins and found no hook 1 can hang a respectable theory on.

  The primary consistency seems to be internal hemorrhaging."

  "Dolphins, seals, birds and humans," Pitt said softly. "They're all vulnerable to this scourge."

  Van Fleet nodded solemnly. "Not to mention the vast numbers of squid and sea turtles that have washed ashore throughout the Pacific and the millions of dead fish found floating off Peru and Ecuador in the past two months."

  "If it continues unstopped there is no predicting how many species of life above and under the sea will become extinct." Pitt turned his gaze toward the sky at the distant sound of the helicopter. "So what do we know except that our mystery plague kills every living thing in air and liquid without discrimination?"

  "All within a matter of minutes," added Maeve.

  Van Fleet came to his feet. He appeared badly shaken. "If we don't determine whether the cause is from natural disturbances or human intervention of some kind, and do it damned quick, we may be looking at oceans devoid of all life."

  "Not just oceans. You're forgetting this thing also kills on land," Maeve reminded him.

  "I don't even want to dwell on that horror."

  For a long minute no one said a word, each trying to comprehend the potential catastrophe that lay somewhere in and beyond the sea. Finally, Pitt broke the silence.

  "It would appear," he said, a pensive look on his craggy face, "that we have our work cut out for us."

  Pitt studied the screen of a large monitor that displayed a computer-enhanced satellite image of the Antarctic Peninsula and the surrounding islands. He leaned back, rested his eyes a moment and then stared through the tinted glass on the navigation bridge of Ice Hunter as the sun broke through the dissipating clouds. The time was eleven o'clock on a summer's evening in the Southern Hemisphere, and daylight remained almost constant.

  The passengers from Polar Queen had been fed and bedded down in comfortable quarters charitably provided by the crew and scientists, who doubled up. Doc Greenberg examined each and every one and found no permanent damage or trauma. He was also relieved to find only a few cases of mild colds but no evidence of pneumonia. In the ship's biolaboratory, two decks above the ship's hospital, Van Fleet, assisted by Maeve Fletcher, was performing postmortem examinations on the penguins and seals they had airlifted from Seymour Island in the helicopter. The bodies of the three dead were packed in ice until they could be turned over to a professional pathologist.

  Pitt ran his eyes over the huge twin bows of the Ice Hunter. She was not your garden-variety research ship but one of a kind, the first scientific vessel entirely computer designed by marine engineers working with input from oceanographers. She rode high on parallel hulls that contained her big engines and auxiliary machinery. Her space-age rounded superstructure abounded with technical sophistication and futuristic innovations. The quarters for the crew and ocean scientists rivaled the staterooms of a luxury cruise ship. She was sleek and almost fragile looking, but that was a deception. She was a workhorse, born to ride smooth in choppy waves and weather the roughest sea. Her radically designed triangular hulls could cut through and crush an ice floe four meters thick.

  Admiral James Sandecker, the feisty director of the National Underwater & Marine Agency, followed her construction from the first computerized design drawing to her maiden voyage around Greenland. He took great pride in every centimeter of her gleaming white superstructure and turquoise hulls. Sandecker was a master of obtaining funds from the new tightfisted Congress, and nothing had been spared in Ice Hunter's construction nor her state-of-the-art equipment. She was without argument the finest polar research ship ever built.

  Pitt turned and refocused his attention on the image beamed down from the satellite.

  He felt almost no exhaustion. It had been a long and tiring day, but one filled with every emotion, happiness and satisfaction at having saved the lives of over twenty people and sorrow at seeing so many of nature's creatures lying dead almost as far as the eye could see. This was a catastrophe beyond comprehension. Something sinister and menacing was out there. A hideous presence that defied logic.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the appearance of Giordino and Captain Dempsey as they stepped out of the elevator that ran from the observation wing above the navigation bridge down through fifteen decks to the bowels of the engine room.

  "Any glimpse of Polar Queen from the satellite cameras?" asked Dempsey.

  "Nothing I can positively identify," Pitt replied. "The snow is blurring all imag
ing."

  "What about radio contact?"

  Pitt shook his head. "It's as though the ship were carried away by aliens from space. The communications room can't raise a response. And while we're on the subject, the radio at the Argentinean research station has also gone dead."

  "Whatever disaster struck the ship and the station," said Dempsey, "must have come on so fast none of the poor devils could get off a distress call."

  "Have Van Fleet and Fletcher uncovered any clues leading to the cause of the deaths?" asked Pitt.

  "Their preliminary examination shows that the arteries ruptured at the base of the creatures' skulls, causing hemorrhaging. Beyond that, I can tell you nothing."

  "Looks like we have a thread leading from a mystery to an enigma to a dilemma to a puzzle with no solution in sight," Pitt said philosophically.

  "If Polar Queen isn't floating nearby or sitting on the bottom of the Weddell Sea," Giordino said thoughtfully, "we might be looking at a hijacking."

  Pitt smiled as he and Giordino exchanged knowing looks. "Like the Lady Flamborough?"

  "Her image crossed my mind."

  Dempsey stared at the deck, recalling the incident. "The cruise ship that was captured by terrorists in the port of Punta del Este several years ago."

  Giordino nodded. "She was carrying heads of state for an economic conference. The terrorists sailed her through the Strait of Magellan into a Chilean fjord, where they moored her under a glacier. It was Dirk who tracked her down."

  "Allowing for a cruising speed of roughly eighteen knots," Dempsey estimated, "terrorists could have sailed Polar Queen halfway to Buenos Aires by now."

  "Not a likely scenario," Pitt said evenly. "I can't think of one solid reason why terrorists would hijack a cruise ship in the Antarctic."

  "So what's your guess?"

  "I believe she's either drifting or steaming in circles within two hundred kilometers of us." Pitt said it so absolutely he left little margin for doubt.